It had been clear for some time that the Waymakers were of the mind that all was fair when getting people saved. Seeing some of the things I would have had to condone had I become one of them made me want to wretch. Lying about who they were so as not to scare people off. Guilt-tripping. Hectoring to the point of harassment. Love-bombing.
Now I could add another item to the list. I already knew that the Waymakers didn’t see those around them as people, but merely as potential notches in their Bibles. But something about how they were planning to use friendships with foreign exchange students to funnel them into KPIC left a particularly rancid taste in my mouth. Taking advantage of vulnerable kids from the States was bad enough. But internationals, especially those from countries where it was hard to get in touch with loved ones back home? That was really low. This is one of many things that still makes me retch when I think about it 20 years later.
That was why just a few days after I torpedoed that gambit, running into some of my “brothers” and “sisters” one night coming out of the Carolina Union had me seething. I was heading out from using the bathroom when I happened to run into Rita Hamer, Eric Syfrett and another one of my former “sisters,” Carrie Donovan.
Rita was the first to spot me. “Hi Darrell,” she said. I wasn’t in any mood to be friendly, instead laying into all three of them. Rita tried to cut me off, saying that she didn’t want to hear anything unpleasant.
That really made me mad. After all, Rita’s love-bombing of me during the second semester of my freshman year still stuck in my craw. Indeed, one of the reasons I had been wary about burrowing back into Waymaker was the prospect of pretending to be friendly with a girl who, at the very least, had pretended to want to be friends with me with the intent of pulling me back into Waymaker. The fact that was the best-case scenario didn’t say a lot for her. If she considered calling that out “unpleasant,” it didn’t say much for her either.
I was literally thisclose to cussing them out in front of everyone. But after a few seconds, I yelled at her, “I know what you did in my freshman year, Rita! And I’m gonna make you pay!” I then stomped off.
When I got back to Granville, I realized I’d skated a bit too close to the line for comfort. I knew that I couldn’t even stand the sight of these people whom I once thought were my friends. For instance, I was hiking to South Campus to pick up some stuff from one of my cousins, a sophomore. It so happened that Waymaker was having a kickoff event there–all the better to scoop up freshmen, apparently. Knowing this, I’d kept my head buried in a DTH to keep from having to say much to them. That didn’t stop Derwin Dhaliwal from spotting me and saying hi. I responded by flipping him off.
But this was another matter altogether. I realized if I’d come that close to blowing up at the Waymakers in public in a way that I wouldn’t be able to defend later on, I really needed to be careful with how I interacted with them. As much as I now hated them, there were some things I just couldn’t do–especially if I planned on hauling them into court. I knew there was a particularly good chance of that happening with Jo Rumsey still staying there. One Sunday, I was walking upstairs from the basement lounge when I saw Jo and her roommate heading out for church. I paused before going through the doors, not wanting to chance a blowup. I continued doing this for the next few weeks.
Little was I to know that when the next major clash happened, it would be the Waymakers who apparently went nuclear.